Articles
| Open Access | Towards Resilient and Privacy-Preserving Multi-Tenant Cloud Systems: A Synthesis of Blockchain, Trusted Execution, Differential Privacy, and Adaptive Isolation Mechanisms
Dr. Elena Márquez , Department of Computer Science, Universidad Internacional de LisboaAbstract
This article presents an extended theoretical synthesis and a comprehensive conceptual framework for designing resilient, privacy-preserving, and QoS-aware multi-tenant cloud systems by integrating four complementary technological and architectural paradigms: blockchain-based decentralized control and provenance, trusted execution environments (TEEs) exemplified by Intel SGX and SGX-aware container runtimes, formalized privacy mechanisms grounded in differential privacy and randomized response, and adaptive tenant separation and detection strategies for runtime isolation and attack mitigation. We examine the strengths, limitations, and interplay among these approaches, and propose a unified architecture that reconciles competing objectives: strong confidentiality and integrity guarantees for tenant data, practical auditability and accountability in federated or multi-cloud deployments, minimal performance degradation under realistic service level agreements, and robust detection and mitigation of VM- and container-based threats including botclouds and distributed denial of service (DDoS). Building on foundational literature in cloud security, privacy, and multi-tenant orchestration, we elaborate a layered methodology that combines (a) blockchain-anchored metadata and access-control contracts for decentralized provenance and SLA enforcement, (b) enclave-protected computation and SCONE-like secure container frameworks for limiting the trusted computing base, (c) differential privacy mechanisms and RAPPOR-style telemetry sanitization to constrain information leakage from aggregated metrics, and (d) fine-grained, SLA-aware tenant separation with multi-level authorization and reputation mechanisms to reduce lateral movement and noisy neighbor effects. We discuss expected tradeoffs, emergent attack surfaces introduced by combined deployments, and measurable indicators for security, privacy, and QoS that operational teams can use for continuous assurance. Finally, the paper outlines open research directions, including verification of blockchain smart contracts for SLA semantics, long-term key management for TEEs in federated clouds, rigorous composition theorems for differential privacy under repeated queries in multi-tenant analytics, and adaptive controllers for load distribution that account for anonymity-preserving telemetry. The synthesis aims to serve as a rigorous theoretical scaffold for experimental systems research and industrial adoption, enabling future empirical evaluation and standardization.
Keywords
multi-tenant cloud security, blockchain provenance, Intel SGX, differential privacy
References
Ren, Y., Wang, J., & Zhang, C. (2018). Block chain-based multi-cloud storage for secure data management in cloud environments. IEEE Access, 6, 36588-36596.
Zyskind, G., Nathan, O., & Pentland, A. (2015). Decentralizing privacy: Using block chain to protect personal data. Proceedings of IEEE Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), 180-184.
Bahga, A., & Madisetti, V. (2016). Block chain platform for industrial Internet of Things. Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, 9(10), 533-546.
Costan, V., & Devadas, S. (2016). Intel SGX explained. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2016, 86.
Arnautov, S., Trach, B., Gregor, F., et al. (2016). SCONE: Secure Linux containers with Intel SGX. Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, 689-703.
Hariharan, R. (2025). Zero trust security in multi-tenant cloud environments. Journal of Information Systems Engineering and Management, 10.
Dwork, C. (2006). Differential privacy. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP), 1-12.
Erlingsson, Ú., Pihur, V., & Korolova, A. (2014). RAPPOR: Randomized aggregately privacy-preserving ordinal response. Proceedings of ACM CCS, 1054-1067.
Subashini, S., & Kavitha, V. (2011). A survey on security issues in service delivery models of cloud computing. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 34(1), 1-11.
Fernandes, D. A. B., Soares, L. F. B., Gomes, J. V., Freire, M. M., & Inácio, P. R. M. (2014). Security issues in cloud environments: A survey. International Journal of Information Security, 13(2), 113-170.
Zhang, Q., Cheng, L., & Boutaba, R. (2010). Cloud computing: State-of-the-art and research challenges. Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 1(1), 7-18.
Cogranne, R., Doyen, G., Ghadban, N., & Hammi, B. (2018). Detecting Botclouds at Large Scale: A Decentralized and Robust Detection Method for Multi-Tenant Virtualized Environments. IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 15(1), 68-82.
Gonzales, D., Kaplan, J. M., Saltzman, E., Winkelman, Z., & Woods, D. (2017). Cloud-Trust-a Security Assessment Model for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Clouds. IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 5, 523-536.
Li, G., Wu, J., Li, J., Zhou, Z., & Guo, L. (2018). SLA-Aware Fine-Grained QoS Provisioning for Multi-Tenant Software-Defined Networks. IEEE Access, 6, 159-170.
Ma, W., Han, Z., Li, X., & Liu, J. (2016). A multi-level authorization based tenant separation mechanism in cloud computing environment. China Communications, 13(5), 162-171.
Wahab, O., Bentahar, J., Otrok, H., & Mourad, A. (2018). Optimal Load Distribution for the Detection of VM-based DDoS Attacks in the Cloud. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing.
Banaie, F., & Seno, S. A. H. (2014). A cloud-based architecture for secure and reliable service provisioning in wireless sensor network. 4th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE), 96-101.
Thakur, S., & Breslin, J. G. (2017). A Robust Reputation Management Mechanism in Federated Cloud.
Article Statistics
Downloads
Copyright License
Copyright (c) 2025 Dr. Elena Márquez (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright of all articles published in (GMJ) Journal is retained by the authors. The articles are licensed under the open access Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which means that anyone can download and read the paper for free.